Welcome from the Vice President for Research

CWRU researchers are among the most distinguished in the world. We have 16 Nobel Laureates among current and former faculty and alumni, 4 members of the National Academies of Sciences, 7 members of the National Academy of Engineering, and 8 members of the Institute of Medicine. We also partner with artistic and cultural institutions on a broad range of projects that make important scholarly contributions in the humanities and social sciences.

Extraordinary research requires an outstanding infrastructure. Our Office of Research & Technology Management provides support to seek out grant funding, to facilitate industrial sponsorship, and to transfer university technologies to the marketplace. This is a place for people driven to make a difference, and our office exists to help them succeed.

SpartaCOI is now available for 2014 Annual Outside Financial Interests Certification

It is time for all full-time faculty and non-faculty investigators to complete the annual CWRU Outside Financial
Interests Certification Form.
CWRU Conflict of Interests Policy requires disclosure at least annually and the deadline
for completion of the 2014 form is April 1, 2015.

The Collections in Support of Biological Research (CSBR) Program provides funds: 1) for improvements to secure, improve, and organize collections that are significant to the NSF BIO-funded research community; 2) to secure collections-related data for sustained, accurate, and efficient accessibility of the collection to the biological research community; and 3) to transfer collection ownership responsibilities.

The CSBR program provides for enhancements that secure and improve existing collections, result in accessible digitized specimen-related data, and develop better methods for specimen curation and collection management. Requests should demonstrate a clear and urgent need to secure the collection, and the proposed activities should address that need. Biological collections supported include established living stock/culture collections, vouchered non-living natural history collections, and jointly-curated ancillary collections such as preserved tissues and DNA libraries.

The Ohio Affiliate of Prevent Blindness is accepting applications for its 2015 Young Investigator Student Fellowship Awards for Female Scholars in Vision Research. The Fellowship Program is designed to provide support for outstanding female scientists committed to pursuing biomedical, behavioral or clinical research careers relevant to the mission of Prevent Blindness– to prevent blindness and preserve sight.

The Dana Foundation's neuroimaging research program focuses on improving human brain and brain-immune functioning to promote health, and prevent and treat disease. Funds support pilot-testing by investigators, who are early in their research careers, to enable them to pursue promising, high-risk, and innovative ideas that have a direct clinical application. The pilot data are anticipated to help increase competitiveness for seeking larger-scale support from other funders.

This program, like all other Dana-supported research, is designed to improve human health. Investigations need to be applicable to human brain or brain-immune functioning or malfunctioning. To be considered for funding, submitted proposals should focus on imaging in patients or patient tissues, and healthy volunteers.

A new joint grant program by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation seeks to give a second life to outstanding out-of-print books in the humanities by turning them into freely accessible e-books.

Over the past 100 years, tens of thousands of academic books have been published in the humanities, including many remarkable works on history, literature, philosophy, art, music, law, and the history and philosophy of science. But the majority of these books are currently out of print and largely out of reach for teachers, students, and the public. The Humanities Open Book pilot grant program aims to “unlock” these books by republishing them as high-quality electronic books that anyone in the world can download and read on computers, tablets, or mobile phones at no charge.

The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation are the two largest funders of humanities research in the United States. Working together, NEH and Mellon will give grants to publishers to identify great humanities books, secure all appropriate rights, and make them available for free, forever, under a Creative Commons license.

The new Humanities Open Book grant program is part of the National Endowment for the Humanities’ agency-wide initiative, The Common Good: The Humanities in the Public Square, which seeks to demonstrate and enhance the role and significance of the humanities and humanities scholarship in public life.

“The large number of valuable scholarly books in the humanities that have fallen out of print in recent decades represents a huge untapped resource,” said NEH Chairman William Adams. “By placing these works into the hands of the public we hope that the Humanities Open Book program will widen access to the important ideas and information they contain and inspire readers, teachers and students to use these books in exciting new ways.”

“Scholars in the humanities are making increasing use of digital media to access evidence, produce new scholarship, and reach audiences that increasingly rely on such media for information to understand and interpret the world in which they live,” said Earl Lewis, President of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. “The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation is delighted to join NEH in helping university presses give new digital life to enduring works of scholarship that are presently unavailable to new generations of students, scholars, and general readers.”

The National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation will jointly provide $1 million to convert out-of-print books into EPUB e-books with a Creative Commons (CC) license, ensuring that the books are freely downloadable with searchable texts and in formats that are compatible with any e-reading device. Books proposed under the Humanities Open Book program must be of demonstrable intellectual significance and broad interest to current readers.

Funding Opportunity Number: HRSA-15-072
The purpose of the Rural Health Value Program is to inform rural health care providers and stakeholders such as HHS, Congress, states, and for-profit and nonprofit entities that set policies impacting rural health care providers about the impacts of changes in the health care delivery system, and to provide technical assistance to rural providers in identifying potential new approaches to health care delivery in their communities. The Office of Rural Health Policy (ORHP) funds community health organizations to test innovative approaches to improving the delivery of care in their communities. Projects focus on a wide range of activities, including direct health care delivery, formation of networks to gain economies of scale and shared knowledge, implementation of quality of improvement strategies, and expansion of health care service delivery via telehealth. Evaluation of these awards documents outcomes and leads to the development of evidence-based practices that may be replicated in other communities. These best practices are shared with the broader rural health community primarily via the Rural Community Health Gateway. ORHP also funds technical assistance providers to work with grantees to implement best practices in their projects. There are numerous opportunities to learn from and highlight the innovations of these grantees, and to share information with the technical assistance providers who support them.

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